Category: Writing

I’m starting a challenge for myself. I’d like to get on a streak of 2,000 words a day, and I’d like to keep it up for 30 uninterrupted days.

Why?

I am practicing the habit of consistency.

I need to produce a certain number of words this month and I don’t want to end-load the month.

I want to prove I can do it. To who? Myself. I have discipline, and it’s time I applied some of that to my writing.

It will be fun. Seriously. It is always fun when you do things you aren’t 100% sure you can do. :)

How will I handle setbacks?

Start over. The streak depends on me writing 2,000 words a day for 30 days in a row. There’s really no way around that, so if I miss my goal one day, the streak has to start over the next day. This will suck if I get to 28 days and screw up, so truthfully, the more invested I get, the more motivation I have to keep with it.

Feel free to join me in this challenge

Although I’m a notorious slowpoke of a writer (about 600 words an hour on my really good days), a lot of writers write a lot faster. I don’t mind. Brag about your 2,000 words in 20 minutes in the comments. I promise not to judge. ;)

I don’t hang with writers, or readers, these days. I hang all alone in my little house (a house that’s far too big when it comes chore time) and I write as much as I can.

I have been aiming for 5,000 words a day for almost 6 months now, but I’ve yet to achieve it on more than a couple of occasions. My usual output is more in the range of 2,000 a day.

Since January (a s.l.o.w. month) I have written 68,614 new words and rewritten in some fashion or another countless more. February on the other hand, wasn’t nearly as slow and of those 68,614 words, 51,396 belonged only to February. I feel like I have hit my stride.

Here’s what it looks like in my spreadsheet.

Fri, 2/1/13

17,218

–

Sat, 2/2/13

17,230

12

Sun, 2/3/13

17,540

310

Mon, 2/4/13

19,973

2,433

Tue, 2/5/13

22,301

2,328

Wed, 2/6/13

24,317

2,016

Thu, 2/7/13

26,803

2,486

Fri, 2/8/13

29,161

2,358

Sat, 2/9/13

31,180

2,019

Sun, 2/10/13

33,225

2,045

Mon, 2/11/13

35,567

2,342

Tue, 2/12/13

37,944

2,377

Wed, 2/13/13

40,790

2,846

Thu, 2/14/13

43,394

2,604

Fri, 2/15/13

44,892

1,498

Sat, 2/16/13

46,040

1,148

Sun, 2/17/13

47,106

1,066

Mon, 2/18/13

48,613

1,507

Tue, 2/19/13

50,098

1,485

Wed, 2/20/13

51,329

1,231

Thu, 2/21/13

53,891

2,562

Fri, 2/22/13

55,008

1,117

Sat, 2/23/13

57,454

2,446

Sun, 2/24/13

59,045

1,591

Mon, 2/25/13

61,244

2,199

Tue, 2/26/13

62,787

1,543

Wed, 2/27/13

66,064

3,277

Thu, 2/28/13

68,614

2,550

Now, why does this matter? Because it’s the most consistent production I’ve had since I started keeping track back in August of 2012. (Not the only time in my life I’ve tracked my daily writing numbers, but the other sheets were YEARS old and out of date.)

Consistency is something I’ve needed to work on for a long time. Finally getting there has been amazing. My experience also says that the more you write, the more you’ll want to write, and the faster and better you’ll get at reaching those daily goals.

I do daily goals because I’m a natural procrastinator. If I set weekly goals, I wouldn’t reach them because the goals are so large that I couldn’t accomplish them in one day. And yes, I already know I would put them off until the last day.

Know thyself: the only way to stomp destructive habits into the ground.

So, my collection of websites continues to shrink as I refuse to renew any that (1) aren’t earning enough to be profitable or (2) bore me. That said, I have purchased 5 new domain names this year in pursuit of my other business. So.

Soon, it will be time for a reorganization of epic proportions. I keep hanging on to the sites that are earning, even though the earnings are stagnant in the best cases, disappearing in the worst, now that I’m not putting any work into any of them.

Well that’s a bummer. I use the eHarlequin affiliate program to generate income for a few sites I have. They were about 5% of my income last year, and I just got the news today that the program was closing effective May 10, 2012. That doesn’t bother me as much as it probably should, but the main site I use them on is a site I don’t actively work on any longer. Haven’t in a couple of years.

Still, if I want to get them off the site and replace the links with other links that might still earn me a few dollars, it’s going to mean changing thousands of links. Yes, that’s right. The site has about 3,000 pages and a large number of them have links to eHarlequin.

I really wish they’d given me more notice because this isn’t really what I had wanted to do with my weekend.